A fun survey and discussion going on at Jalopnik. Worthy of continuing here...

My vote is for Paul Tracy - for lots of reasons. The Chrome Horn, and egging Bourdais to take his helmet off for a fight, in the middle of the track, during a race... come to mind.

 

After a bad wreck when his eyes were nearly swollen shut, Ricky Rudd taped his eye lids open to pactice. He also won a race while getting second degree burns on his back & butt, but refused to give way to a substitute driver.

Q: I have always wondered how you taped your eyes open and how uncomfortable was that? How long were they actually open?

Rudd: It was one of these deals where you do what you have to do.

I didn't start off with that in mind. I was at Daytona and had a pretty big wreck in the Bud Shootout -- it was the Busch Clash then -- came back, and we had a day off because it rained, came back to the racetrack, I guess a day had gone by since we had actually been in the wreck, went out in the race car.

I knew I had to get back in the horse that had thrown me off pretty quickly and I got back out onto the racetrack. And I noticed when I got into the corner I sort of got vertigo.


I didn't know if it was an inner-ear distortion problem, trauma to the inner ear, or whatever, but my balance mechanism went kind of haywire and everything would go dark when I went into the corner.

My face was swollen really badly, looked like I had been beat up pretty bad by somebody much bigger than me, it wasn't really hard to think about it. I looked at my face. I could hardly open my eyes to begin with.

They were like little slits. What was happening was that I was going into the corner and the vertical g-load at Daytona is not a whole lot, but it's probably a G and a half, two Gs vertical max, but everything was going dark and it was mainly like shutting your eyes.

So I knew I had to do something. I had to fix it, so there was some duct tape up on the toolbox. The guys were changing the spark plugs, I said, 'Let me go back and try this again.'

I never told them I was uncomfortable. I went around there wide-open but I never told them I was really uncomfortable in the car. I went and got a roll of duct tape.

I didn't have Band-Aids. I would have used Band-Aids, but I didn't have any. But the duct taped it right there, so I just kind of took all the extra skin and taped it to my eyelid and taped it up to my forehead and put my helmet on and went on.

That is pretty Bad ****.

 

That's definitely a badass story!

 

Tonylop33, that is a great story!

. . . . Here are some people that come to mind in my opinion (no particular order) . . .

John Coletti
Dale Earnhardt
A.J. Foyt
Alan Mulally - to change the mindset of a company is pretty bad*** in my opinion.
Jon Moss
Enzo Ferrari - told FMC to take a hike!
Henry Ford II - Beat Ferrari at LeMans after Enzo said 'take a hike!'
Steve McQueen
James Hunt
Jimmy Clark
Mario Andretti
Allan Moffat
Carol Shelby (Younger)
David Pearson

I think I would agree with Paul Tracy as well. I have always enjoyed watching him race!

And I'm sure I will think of some more . . .

 

Henry Ford!

 

That's too easy. Why and how?

 

Perhaps because he pioneered the use of the assembly line and made mass producing automobiles possible...? I consider that pretty badass.

 

If it were just about persona I'd go with Steve McQueen hands down. The dude was all about cars and going fast and being cool and he wasn't even a professional.

But Mr. Ford depending on how you look at his founding of Ford was either a genius like Edison or as crafty a business man as Bill Gates. Whether they were truly his ideas or borrowed from others he made them work and they worked beautifully. He made the car American IMHO and he also made race cars though it was reluctantly from what I gather. He made alll that came afterward possible.

Sure there's the Dodge brothers and others, but Mr. Ford was a harass. He was a giant amongst men. When the company was down, he stepped back in to build it back. He built an assload of b-25s to help win the war and countless jeeps. He was professionally the baddest *** car
dude of all time!

 

Preston Tucker. He pioneered fast, safe car standards as we know them today. And the fact that he made some race engines for Henry Ford and met the Chevrolet brothers. Too bad he was hosed by the other American Auto manufacturers

 

I would definitely consider Tucker a badass. He definitely got Detroit wound up, what with his talk of making automobiles safe and all. Oh yeah, putting a helicopter engine in a car was pretty inspired too.

 

Can't forget Paul Newman...


Newman spoke of his passion for racing during a 1995 interview with the AP shortly after he was part of the winning team in the Daytona 24-Hours sports car endurance race. He was 70 years old at the time. No one remotely close to that age had ever won in that event.
When Newman decided to get into racing, it was more than just being in the cockpit that interested him. He became a car owner in the Can-Am Series, campaigning cars for a number of top drivers, including Indianapolis 500 winners Al Unser, Danny Sullivan and Bobby Rahal, as well as Formula One champion Keke Rosberg.
After competing against team owner Carl Haas in Can-Am, Newman formed a partnership with the Chicago businessman, starting Newman/Haas Racing in 1983 and joining the CART series.
With Mario Andretti hired as its first driver, the team was an instant success. Throughout the last 26 years, the team — now known as Newman/Haas/Lanigan and part of the IndyCar Series — has won 107 races and eight series championships with drivers like Michael Andretti, Nigel Mansell, Cristiano da Matta, Paul Tracy and Sebastien Bourdais.
Newman's many charitable works extended to racing. Kyle Petty and his wife founded a camp for chronically ill children in North Carolina, modeled on Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang camps.
"He was dedicated to giving back to those less fortunate and with each child we see, we honor his spirit and vision," Petty said.
Two-time Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart competed against Newman in several sports car races.
After playing the role of an Indy 500 driver in "Winning," Newman found he couldn't get the driving bug out of his system. And he found he had a real talent for the sport.
Newman began racing sports cars in amateur divisions and won his first race in 1972 at Thompson, Conn., in a Lotus Elan. He earned the first of four SCCA National title in 1976 in the D-Production class and also won championships in the 1979 C-Production category, as well as taking the GT-1 championship in 1985 and 1986.
His first professional victory came in the rain at an SCCA trans-Am race at Brainerd, Minn., in 1982.
When the Indy Racing League was formed, Newman/Haas stuck with CART and Newman tried numerous times during the 12-year split to broker a deal to get the rival organizations back under one banner.
Once, when a deal appeared close in the late 1990s, Newman summoned a writer to his motor coach at Portland, Ore., and demanded: "Write about this now and we'll put some pressure on these people to get this done," he said, with a profanity tossed in to underline his point.
It finally did get done, but not until this past February.
Newman was thrilled by the unification, even though it was the IRL's IndyCar Series that wound up the winner of the internecine warfare.
"It's about time," Newman said. "Now, we can tell potential sponsors we have a future and mean it, and we can develop great, young drivers that will attract new fans to the sport. The future looks much brighter now."
Newman drove his last race as a professional in the 2005 Daytona 24-Hours and even ran some hot laps around his beloved Lime Rock Park in August.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,429242,00.html